Worth the Trouble ✓

10 | milestones

SOMETIMES I COMPARE SUKI'S PARENTS and mine.

Even when Mom lived with us, she was never at home. Her office work consumed her, till I found out she'd mixed in pleasure with her business.

Dad feels like a ghost of the man he once was.

The hours he works are up to whoever rosters the shifts at Scoresby. If their current construction project is roadworks, Dad works night shifts and sleeps during the day. If it's real estate in the gentrifying suburbs, he works day shifts and visits the bar at night. Dad definitely provides. He makes sure I'm not screwing up my own future too much. But between landing myself in jail and returning home every night, I can do pretty much whatever I want.

That might sound like a teenager's dream, but I miss the days when he would show up. Back when Mom and Dad still loved each other—or were still pretending—Dad and I would drive around the city until Mom was ready to be picked up from work. That was so long ago that we only had one car for our family, shared between two late twenty-somethings madly in love.

Dad would sit in the front row at my basketball games, and cheer the loudest when our team scored. Now each time I get a detention pass, Dad looks straight at my eyes and beyond, like I'm transparent. Like I'm not there.

Then he sighs, says something like, "Let me know if you need to be picked up," and trundles to the living room TV.

Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to have parents that love me enough to ruin my life with rules and groundings.

I've never met Suki's parents, but her father is a property dealer and her mother is a nurse. They both work long hours, which was part of the reason she took up cello and ballroom lessons. A way to keep her occupied after school, when no-one else was at home. Suki's parents are traditional, regimented. They both think there is a right way to live life, and they don't refrain from telling Suki that.

Milestone One: She must get a university degree before she starts working full time—no freelancing. What's an unpaid internship?—otherwise she'll be stuck in a career path that has a wage ceiling.

Milestone Two: She must work full time before she buys a house—renting is an unproductive investment, she mustn't do that either—otherwise she'll have to take loans or a mortgage with less than optimal interest rates.

Milestone Three: She must have her own house before she marries, otherwise she could become dependent on a man that might leverage her living situation against her.

Milestone Four: She must marry before she has children, otherwise there's strong incentive the father will leave.

"Among many, many other rules," Suki remarks bitterly, filling in another line of our math workbook.

I thought no one could compel me to excel at mathematics. To excel at anything academic, really. I'm not a cerebral guy. I have no deep thoughts about faith, religion, the universe. I'm just here, dropped into a life that's shitty by middle class standards but glorious by world standards.

My goal is to make the best of it while not getting pulled up by authority for the questionable ways I have fun. I'll do well enough to get my high school diploma, but I can't wait until senior year when I can take as many hands-on electives as possible. I'm good with my hands, not my head.

Maybe, I'll be a builder like Dad in the future.

But a strange thing happened since finding myself in Maths with Suki. We're hiding our relationship and spending spare time away from prying eyes. And after two weeks of studying with her in the library, a fucking ingenious idea struck me.